Upgrading from NetWare 5.0 to NetWare 6: Field Notes

Here are some very useful notes from a Novell Consultant in New Zealand, that just might save you a lot of time (and grief) when you upgrade to NetWare 6. Thanks, Daren!

I have recently performed a NetWare 6 upgrade in an environment that had a number of NetWare 5.0 servers, and thought I'd share some things I learned. This information is from actual experience and it may help if you happen to be on a similar project.

The example of issues comes from an environment that had 8 Servers in total, mainly Compaq ProLiant 1850R and 5500 series. Only one server, 1850R, upgraded from NetWare 5.0 without an issue. The site is functional and stable under NetWare 6 now, despite the migration pains.

NetWare 6 upgrade Issues/Fixes

Could not update the Certificate Authority Server:

NWDeploy.exe from NW6 CD (Deployment Manager) - Step 4

Don't forget to document the entire security container. Screen
shots from NWAdmin and ConsoleOne are fine. I have had to blow
away the entire contents of this container as the CA server
would not update, then recreate the CA authority
information. The documentation was useful.

Most of the servers crashed during or after being upgraded:

Approaching the upgrade completion, one server would start,
then after loading LAN drivers & NLSFLAIM, would come up
with a message "critical error has occurred, the server
will shutdown in two minutes". Most servers gave me enough
time to get through the service pack install before crashing.
Once the service pack was installed (SP1) problems virtually
went away.

My advice would be to use the NetWare 6 SP1 (or 2) overlay
CD for both new installations and upgrades. I have had issues with the base installation CD
on most servers so far. Some servers (e.g. Intel Server
board) will not work without the SP1 (or greater) overlay
CD as they use an area of memory to vector bios
information and that conflicts with the standard NW6
installation. I have got it working with the overlay CD.

After the upgrade, use ConsoleOne to delete (yes, delete!)
the LDAP, SAS and SSL (IP and DNS) objects for the newly
upgraded server ONLY. Re-run the NW6 installation from
scratch. (Yes, tedious.)

Repeat this process until the objects are created cleanly
during the install.

It usually only takes about two attempts but you are left
with a server that will support all our new stuff.

It is important to read carefully any error message and
resolve the issues.

NDS 608 errors mixed DS ver replica ring:

DS would not synchronize 608 errors on two eDirectory 8.6.2 servers.

Excessive skulk on remaining servers DS version 7.51. (Systems still
operational). We solved this. DS7.51 and eDirectory 8.6.2 are a supported combination
but I don't think the crashing helped matters.

A number of NDPS (NetWare 5.0 to 6) objects no longer functioned.

An issue I had with NDPS on our site is that the Controlled Access
Printer objects had been created using IPX. There were issues
once NDPS was updated and I had to recreate many printers
using the IP method.

ZENworks 2

This was fine. Make sure it is patched to the latest.

GroupWise 5.5

This was fine. Make sure it is patched to the latest.

BorderManager 3.0 stopped working.

This is no surprise, however once I updated to BorderManager
3.6, a large number of workstations could no longer authenticate
to the proxy cache using clntrust.exe, therefore there was no Internet.

I was assured (prerequisite) that all the Novell workstation clients
had been, or were, up to date. Ahh, the folly of assumption and
the extremely short time frame for the project prohibited checking
under every rock.

Once the Windows 95 3.1 clients had been updated to 3.31 (latest
tested version for the site) the problem went away.

ACU has been implemented now :)

PXYHOSTS opened or created using task zero.

BorderManager: See TID 10070018. We haven't solved this one as far as the error message is concerned, but the system still works.

Btrieve Database stopped working.

In this case the version went from 7 to 7.9.
Check if there are any applications still using btrieve, excluding
Arcserve. The new version is different and dependent apps
may stop working. This became a real hassle on one site.

DOS batch processing on %CN:

We had a DOS app fail its authentication menu script as the login
name being parsed from NetWare was upper case but seemed
to change to sentence case after the upgrade. Easy to fix
but it can burn time and make you think that something
major has happened.

NFS 2.4 - 3 is not supported on NetWare 6:

Novell is leveraging Native File Access and NDPS LPR LPD. However, NFS has added functionality with regards to
storage for UNIX systems and we could not migrate away from it.

NFS 3 is supported in NetWare 5.1 which means eDirectory 8.6.2 can be installed. The process of moving from NFS version 2.4 to 3 means a complete deletion and recreation of the NFS system.

Dual 3COM LAN card fault tolerance:

Don't use the 3COM proprietary fault tolerance drivers for
NetWare 6. Use the Load Balance Fault tolerance
that is native with NetWare 6. It works well and is
configurable in inetcfg.

Multi Processor Systems crash after 2 days running:

Without the NetWare 6 support pack overlay, I found it necessary
to start disabling CPQMPK.PSM and stop the multi processor support
during the upgrades.

Some multi processor servers continued to have a problem after the
upgrade even with a support pack installed. The NDSAudit patch solved
these.

Typical errors before patch:

Abend 2 on P00: Kernel detected an attempted context switch when it
was not allowed.

Abend 1 on P01: Server-5.60b-4457: CSleepUntilInterrupt can be called
only on P0

Apache log files:

I had an Apache log grow to over 1.5GB and fill the SYS: volume. This is
rare and has not happened again. It pays to monitor the Volume after the
upgrade. I put a restriction on the Apache log file system.